I’m excited to be chosen as a speaker at Experts Live Switzerland (formerly known as System Center Universe). This 1-day conference will run on May 17, 2017 in the Workspace of Welle 7 in Bern.

Over 15 Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVP) and community experts will deliver topics such as cloud platform, cloud productivity, datacenter management, workplace management, security and compliance in three parallel tracks. Beside the keynotes, all sessions will be held in German and have a strong focus on the local Swiss market.

My session starts at 10:30 AM in room 3.53 and will cover the following topic:

The SharePoint & Dynamics CRM communities in Switzerland are combining synergies on the first “SharePoint & CRM Saturday” ever in Zurich, on May 13. The free community-driven event takes place at Microsoft Switzerland in Wallisellen and opens registration at 8:30 AM.

10 Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVP) from throughout Europe and local community experts will deliver sessions around SharePoint, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM. Most of the sessions will be held in English.

At 11:15 AM I’ll be delivering a session on “SharePoint 2016 architecture and sizing”:
The implementation of a new SharePoint farm can quickly become a big challenge in a complex IT environment. SharePoint is intended to be seamlessly integrated into the existing infrastructure, to be accessible externally, to obtain information from other systems, to be quick and fail-safe. The IT department is challenged to translate these vague ideas into technical parameters to meet the business requirements. I will show you where to start and how to design a fast, reliable and sustainable SharePoint farm on-premises, hybrid or in the cloud.

The schedule and more information about the event can be found on the official website spsevents.org.

Join us
Despite this event being free, there are still a few tickets available. Grab yours now!

Weeks before the European SharePoint conference (Nov 14-17, 2016) had started the European SharePoint community was asked to vote for their top European SharePoint influencers. During last Wednesdays ESPC award night, the 4th annual announcement of the top 25 European SharePoint influencers took place in the Vienna Hofburg Imperial Palace. The Hofburg Palace is the former imperial palace, of which a part is used by the President of Austria as residence and workplace today.

Microsoft announced today the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) of SharePoint Server 2016. The new version of SharePoint got fundamental updates comparing to SharePoint Server 2013.
SharePoint Server 2016 comes with the following key features:

Improved provisioning capabilities

Mobile and touch

App Launcher

New and improved controls

Simple and natural sharing

Large file support

Compliance tools

This release also comes with an improved provisioning and update management and hybrid options to link SharePoint with Exchange Server 2016 and Office 365. As of today the cloud hybrid search for SharePoint Server 2013 and higher has reached its general availability status. Microsoft also announced the RTM of Project Server 2016 which is included in the SharePoint Server 2016 bits.
SharePoint Server 2016 will reach its general availability (GA) in early May and can be downloaded in the Microsoft Volume Licensing Service Center after that.

Weeks before the European SharePoint conference (Nov 9-12, 2015) had started, harmon.ie asked the European SharePoint community to vote for their top European Office 365 influencers. During last Wednesdays ESPC award night, the 3rd annual announcement of the top 25 European Office 365 influencers took place in the City Hall in Stockholm. That’s the same place the Noble Prize Award Ceremony is held every year.
harmon.ie describes the Top 25 European Office 365 influencers as “the group who lead the way on collaboration in the digital workplace and guide European Office 365 and SharePoint users on how they can achieve the full potential of their Office 365 investments.”

I’m very happy to be awarded as one of the top 25 European Office 365 influencers (19th place). Thank you everyone who voted for me! This is a wonderful recognition of my community efforts and motivates me to go on. Special thanks goes to my lovely girlfriend for her continuous support.

With today’s announcement of SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview Microsoft also released the Cloud Hybrid Search which allows customers to retrieve unified search results in Office 365. It will work with SharePoint Server 2013 and is native to SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview. The new Cloud Hybrid Search Service Application will start working on September 7th.

Seth Patton, Senior Director of Product Management for SharePoint and OneDrive, announced at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference that the first public preview of SharePoint Server 2016 will be released next month. That’s very surprising because Microsoft postponed the release dates right before the Microsoft Ignite (more information in this post).

Microsoft also announced the release of the Cloud Search Service Application Preview for SharePoint 2013 in August 2015. The new Cloud Search Service Application, which is natively built in SharePoint 2016, crawls on-premises content sources and feeds the Office 365 search index to create a unified search experience for users in hybrid environments.